The lesser of two evils, for lack of better phrasing. Government is as much a business as a car dealership. In democracies true democracy, nothing will ever get accomplished because a 6th grade dropout's opinion shouldn't weigh as heavily as, say a civil engineer's. That may sound bigoted and biased but I don't want someone who has never bought groceries with their own money telling me what to do with mine.

Well, they're very different things, one is a system of governance, and the other is an economic model. Neither of them seem to work any better than anything else we've come up with.
We keep making new shit up, every time with the intention of eliminating the exploitation of the many for the sake of the few. In the end though, every system we've come up with ends up a tool for the fortunate few to exploit everybody else.
Clearly, we have to change something more fundamental, maybe hoarder instinct? Maybe we just have to evolve before any system will effectively serve us all.

Democracy is only freedom for the majority to oppress the minority. If you're a straight, white, conservative, Protestant male 40 years or older, democracy is great; if not, you're up shit's creek. Capitalism as we know it is also incredibly flawed, but that's because we've always have the engine of the state and its vested interests (the aforementioned favored majority) dictating its course.

Socialism and Capitalism are two essentially inert, harmless ideas in and of themselves. Implemented on a voluntary level, there's no reason why a developed economy couldn't have incredibly successful regional experiments in both systems; the thing that always taints and corrupts both socialism AND capitalism is the Monopoly on Violence; the state.

I submit to you that the idea of a small ruling class taking upon itself the sole authority to steal, conscript, and murder its subjects is ideologically incompatible with both socialism and capitalism, because it negates the egalitarian principles of the former and perverts the market incentives of the latter.

I believe in true deomocracy.........
One of the most brilliant people I ever heard speak of history particularly as it is told in America was Howard Zinn. Actually pretty much everything he's ever said has been brilliant. I can't find the exact video where he talks about the history of democracy but this one is pretty good.......It's from 2005 when he was on the Daily Show.......

you can take on whatever political system you want, in the end, it's ideas that rule nations, not men/women. Tyrants would be removed if the people they were exploiting were smart enough to understand and act on what was happening.

Free-market capitalism is the only way to allow freedom to mature. Cartelization and monopolization can only realistically happen via government interference through protectionism and so forth, and in the event it does happen in the unhampered market, which is quite rare, they still cannot enforce monopoly/cartel prices because their competition is just aching for them to push their customers away to them.

The problem in America is economics is not studied by the vast majority of people, and yet everyone assumes that they understand how and why things work. For this reason, the United States is mistaken for having a free market. Of course, the response is to call for regulation/overhaul, or some other form of government intervention into the market, and all systems of intervention inevitably lead to Corporatism (Fascism) or Socialism. Since the long run is not desirable, it we must believe that the effects of interventionism are not desirable.

You support slavery, prostitution, legalized heroin and crack and child labor? If you don't support all of those things, you are in favor of government regulation.

I agree that ideas rule nations. Ideas, however, are vastly different from ideologies. Ideologies are a substitute for thinking, and a very poor substitute at that. All problems deserve a solution, not a one-size fits all ideology.

you have no idea how wrong you are. slavery occured because the government failed in its only duty: protection of private property rights... and you cannot possibly have a free market without private property rights. I am for legalized heroin and crack... what I do with my body, and what others do with theirs, is their own business. Bring in the government when they infringe on someone's rights. Child labor is a more debatable topic, but it should be noted that government intervention didn't end child labor, the high productivity of capitalism did.

all problems do deserve solutions... and only in the free market is the ingenuity of people who have solutions released, because in any other market the iron fist of government is what it is, regardless of what you think.

Government is not the only entity that can rule with an iron fist. In America, the federal government is extremely weak and is in the iron fist grasp of oligarchical, tyrannical corporations.

I could agree with your general position, but unfortunately, in the real world we are not faced with a choice between government control and liberty. Government barely registers on the radar in the context of control in the US, except as the tool of unelected, private despotisms.

government put the corporations in power. the health care industry, the bankers... the media for that matter... it is extraordinarily rare to have monopolies and cartels in free markets... for about 97% cases they emerge because of government favoritism... the other 3%, maybe less, form in markets, and when they do form they are short lived and can't even charge monopoly prices...

All of that may be true, but this is the situation that we now find ourselves in. We don't have a functioning news media and, as a result, we don't have a functioning democracy. I don't see how we could possibly reverse this situation without some government intervention. People are certainly not going to vote with their pocketbooks.

corporations get their positions via government intervention... I fail to see how more government intervention is the answer. if you're telling me our choices are between socialism and corporatism, then we're in deep stuff....

We're already in a 100% corporatist system. Anything that does not support the corporatist status quo is self-censored out of the media or limited to the darkest corners of the fringe. Corporatism is accepted by 99.9% of the population as normal, without question. In fact, corporatism and the free market are synonymous to the vast majority of Americans.

I'm not advocating socialism at all. The health care bill is clearly not socialism. If anything, it's a pro-business bill.

I agree with everything you're saying... but how can more government be the answer? shouldn't the answer be to end all the favoritism and force our government to return to a strict adherence of property rights, rather than handing out tons of money and passing protectionist legislation for corporations? growth in government isn't needed to do these things...

I should say that through this whole conversation, I'm primarily thinking of media corporations. They have the biggest impact on democracy and it's just always been a big concern for me. The problem with media companies - the companies that provide the information that is the lifeblood of democracy - is that they are global in scale. Every US based media company receives the majority of it's profits from foreign countries. If the US government stops playing favorites with media companies, will it make any difference? They've outgrown us, have they not?